April 2009 Archives

I had planned to write a long, detailed post on MailTips, but… well, you know the old saying: "you snooze, you lose." I was beaten to it by EJ, who happens to be the MailTips program manager at Microsoft. If you want to get a sense of what MailTips are and how they work, see his post at the Exchange team blog. However, note that MailTips require support in the client (OWA 2010 or Outlook 2010) and on the server. The public beta version of Exchange 2010 has the server support, but not the OWA support, so you won't be able to test them yourself unless and until Microsoft releases a more recent server build to the public.

As soon as I saw this book on the net, I knew I had to read it. Here's a capsule review. First, it has perhaps the most vulgar language of any book I have ever read. It made the worst cursing I heard in the Marines seem like a Sunday school lesson. If you are easily offended, definitely don't read it. (Even the table of contents would be enough to get the book an R rating if it were a movie!) There's a funny comment on Dobyns' blog in which an 11-year-old complains that his dad won't let him read the book, to which Dobyns responds "Your dad is correct. You can't read No Angel until you're 30."

Second, the author is clearly as crazy as an outhouse rat. Infiltrate the Hells Angels? Why not do something less crazy, like jumping off a bridge with an anvil duct-taped to your head?

Dobyns recounts his early career in the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Firearms and explains how his personality led him to seek risky undercover assignments. When he sees an opportunity to attack the Angels from within, he has a hard time convincing his superiors, but eventually wins them over through a combination of persistence, solid evidence gathering, and missteps by the Angels that make them seem like a bigger danger to public order than they might actually have been. If anything, I was surprised by how trusting the Angels leadership was, but that's as much a testament to Dobyns' skill as an undercover officer as it is to their desire to quickly expand throughout Arizona.

Dobyns (and his ghostwriter) tell a fascinating story in vivid detail. It's clear throughout that Dobyns respects many aspects of the Angels culture, like their sense of brotherhood and honor. That doesn't mean that he's willing to excuse their actual criminal behavior, and he makes that clear as well. The story itself is fascinating; Dobyns starts by creating a fake chapter of a Mexican motorcycle gang and uses it to establish credibility with Angels leaders, culminating in their invitation to "patch over" and join the Angels. Along the way, hijinks ensue: there are beatings, gun sales, boozy motorcycle rides, and testosterone galore. (I don't want to be more specific so I don't spoil any surprises!)

At the end of the book, I couldn't help wondering whether the sacrifices he and his family made were worth the eventual outcome of the case, in which internal squabbling amongst the prosecution team resulted in lower sentences and the dismissal of charges against a few key players. (As a bonus, now Dobyns has a lawsuit against the ATF claiming that they are failing to protect him and his family from reprisals.)

Highly recommended for those with thick skins and strong stomachs.

Moz Hussein, Rajesh Jha, and Gurdeep Singh Pall delivered the INTERACT 2009 keynote. (I was liveblogging it, but couldn't post it until after the event, then I forgot.)

Rajesh: software + services is a "very pragmatic, and I think in some ways, inevitable, part of every organization's array of things to think about." Every org has to decide what's best for it based on constraints, goals, compliance requirements, etc. S+S means "no technology ultimatum" imposed by the vendor: you can move workload between the cloud and premises in whatever mix makes sense for you. "We think about 40% of organizations don't offer e-mail or advanced communication services to their employees"-- target for Deskless Worker Services. Experiences from running Exchange 2010 dogfood for Exchange Labs has provided great feedback, including accelerated innovation and stability.

Gurdeep: what's OCS doing around services? "First and foremost, we're letting Exchange go in and figure out our problems!" (this got a big laugh.) IM and presence being offered starting 15 April for Office Communications Online standard edition customers.

Rajesh: Consumer technologies aren't manageable, but consumerization of IT is real-- it's happening. Every university, college, high school student is used to gigabyte mailboxes. Technology that works for the older generation may not be what you need to attract and retain the newer generation.

Gurdeep: "I'll never forgive marketing folks for changing the INTERACT format." (chuckles) Lots of change and transformation in the voice market, all going on with the backdrop of "the biggest economic event we'll see in our lifetimes." It's both concerning and a great opportunity.

Moz: what does the economy mean for IT pros?

Gurdeep: a lot of things are out of our control. People deal with that in different ways. Within Microsoft, we discussed how to deal with this. Researched the Great Depression, including figuring out how many of the Fortune 100 survived and/or grew. Common thread: innovation and transformation (e.g. Sears transformed from exclusive mail-order to rural customers to a mix of mail-order and retail). Things to do: manage costs "like you've never done before", but be careful not to eat away muscle-- during a rebound, that's when you'll fail. #1 step typically is changing how you do things.

Moz: what does "unified" really mean?

Gurdeep: NYC is an amazing city. Latest discovery: you can buy great, amazing brand-name bags right on the street for real cheap! (laughs) What's interesting: those were cheap imitations. Problem in this industry: we have expensive imitations in the UC space. After intro of UC technology, benefits have driven wide adoption of "unified" as a moniker, but lots of so-called UC systems are the results of acquisitions-- multiple user experiences, multiple back-ends, complicated provisioning. Important for buyers to be savvy about what's unified and what isn't. Don't be fooled by checkbox comparisons. How many distinct user experiences are users going to be subjected to? Video conferencing systems are semi-widespread, but why aren't they used more? They're too hard to use! MS focus on single directory, single set of components, single management experience provides a true unified experience. How did a billion people get on the Internet? Self-driven-- you couldn't intentionally train a billion people to do anything if you wanted to.

Moz: how are Exchange and OCS getting closer together?

Gurdeep: we're already tied together in many ways: directory, common contacts, etc. "If you have Exchange 2007 deployed, then adding OCS 2007 R2, is much easier now than it has been in the past." Still some areas of mismatch (like Powershell; Powershell support coming to OCS in the next release). As we move forward, we're looking at other integration points, but "you cannot push this too far"-- handling for different content types like voice and e-mail are fundamentally different.

Rajesh: my favorite OCS feature is that they're going to be adding PowerShell, "giving everyone a unified way to manage. That's a great example where we're working towards giving you more common tools across workloads."

Gurdeep: my favorite Exchange feature: 70% IOPS reduction from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, then a further 50% reduction from 2007 to Exchange 2010.

Moz: how should people be approaching the architecture for UC?

Gurdeep: I have all these disparate systems for conferencing, video, etc. I made disparate decisions to buy them because they're separate silos. Microsoft's UC vision unifies all these things, but you can't just throw away what you already have. First priority: develop an overall UC architecture vision to get a "magnetic north". If you're ready to resign your expensive contract for audioconferencing service, having an architecture helps you consider rolling out OCS for that-- and once the infrastructure is in place, you can easily and quickly add new capabilities. IM and presence are core features that are easy to get up and running. For many of your users, ask the question: is that desk phone still necessary? Would you rather buy a $300 netbook or a $300 IP phone? Lifetime costs for phones are baked into the system-- you have to discover and eliminate them. Simple rule: if you can get down to 1 of anything, likely you'll be paying less for it. PBX industry is a lot like the mainframe industry: vertically integrated, single source. Once they sold you the mainframe, they had you! "Don't buy the mainframe!" The decisions you make now will lock you in for the next 5-6 years. Don't get locked in, and be savvy about the cost and changes that are there.

Moz: as you think about the role of the IT pro, what's the to-do list for prospering in the current situation?

Rajesh: Very important to have a vision of where you want to go. Economic environment imposes constraints. Resource constraints can be a huge clarifying factor: we force ourselves to impose constraints and use them to make progress on longer-term plans. Admins lead by understanding their organizational goals and technologies, then driving changes.

Gurdeep: no one ever calls telecom managers to ask them to help move solutions forward-- they call to yell that phones are down. Change in roles: have to figure out how to get ahead and move the business forward. Many examples: if the economic situation stays like this, companies will have to ask whether it makes sense to have expensive real estate.

Moz: we're announcing Exchange 14 tomorrow. What 3 things do you most want to talk about?

Rajesh: Let me do 4! Super-excited about Exchange 2010. Available in public beta on 15 April. First key investment: important for us to keep the end user in mind. What we do to make them productive translates into cost savings. $650 billion/yr lost to e-mail interruptions (based on Basex): 25% of IW workday is responding to e-mail. We give you access from broad range of mobile phones and browsers, but we also provide tools to manage information overload. MailTips, voice mail preview, "ignore conversation". Archiving and compliance improvements.

Gurdeep: having IM contacts built into OWA is a very cool feature too.

Q&A

What are some of the developer opportunities for this combined platform?

Gurdeep: taking a software-centric approach opens up a lot of opportunities. Developer opportunity really isn't there on traditional PBX systems.Single biggest opportunity for transformation isn't replacing voice with OCS-- it's to allow you to think across all the software in your enterprise with communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). A word of caution: enterprise developers speak a different language! Example: "MSExpense is a tool that we use so that when you spend money we cause you pain." We're working with the internal app developers to IM and presence-enable MSExpense so the app can use presence status to alert people and make routing decisions.

Rajesh: Mac Business Unit moving to Exchange Web Services for Entourage. We're also trying to get RIM to move their services over to EWS instead of MAPI.

How is Microsoft using software + services?

Rajesh: We're moving some of our internal users over to the services platform. We're using the high availability and DAS work that we've been doing for customers internally as a proving ground.

What are some of the biggest blockers to software + services?

Gurdeep: go back to 1997-- knowing what you know now, would you buy a mainframe? There are industries where software as an application can become a blocker.

11 years ago today, our family received a wonderful gift: a new baby boy. We named him Thomas Raphael: Thomas because we liked it as a good, strong name, and Raphael after my grandfather and great-grandfather. In the years since, Tom has been such a blessing to us. He is compassionate, energetic, smart, athletic, and generally fun to be around. Happy birthday, Tom!

What a month May is shaping up to be.

First, I'm teaching a series of classes at the US Navy's Center for Information Dominance, as part of a very cool experimental program on improving the ability of expert systems to teach. The program is named Skynet Digital Tutor. Read up on it here. For the duration, I'll be teaching from 10a-10p each weekday. Jim said it was good fun, though, so I'm looking forward to it, except for being away from my family for two whole weeks. That's the longest I've been away since 2000, and honestly I don't like it one bit. Thankfully we have phones, web cams, and so on, so it won't be as though I'm cut off from them completely. In the meantime, I stocked my apartment with yogurt, microwave popcorn, and fresh fruit, so I'm good to go.

Next, I get to go home for about a day and a half, then it's off to TechEd USA 2009! I'm doing a session on OCS 2007 R2 deployment and management. Because I need a demo playpen, I'm building one in Hyper-V using OCS 2007 R2 and Exchange 2010 532.09, a later build than the public beta. It's been fun to set up a clean environment from scratch, as opposed to the complicated environments we've been building for various demos and launch events.

After TechEd I have three whole days at home, then it's back to Seattle to teach the UM portion of rotation 3 for the Microsoft Certified Master for Exchange class. I'm really looking forward to this, as it will be the first time I've delivered my new version of the material. After that, I'm sure I'll be ready for some time off (though hopefully by then we'll be ready to start househunting! No offers yet, though.)

Hopefully this will magically appear at the correct time.

The fact that Exchange 2010 includes database availability groups has some implications that you may not have thought of. Most of them, I hadn't thought of either, which is why it's great that there are smart people like Ross Smith IV (the original; accept no substitutes). Ross sent some suggested practices for Exchange 2010 database naming to TAP admins, and I wanted to share them.

Here's the deal: in Exchange 2007 and earlier, mailbox and public folder databases are children of server objects. That means that you can uniquely identify a database by a combination of its name (which may not be unique throughout the forest) and its server name (which is guaranteed by AD to be unique). In Exchange 2010, the database is no longer "owned" by a particular server. Instead, it's a member of a DAG, and it may actually become active on any server in the DAG at any time. That means that your database names shouldn't include the name of the server. DAGs can span AD sites, too, so guess what: don't use the AD site name (or the name of the physical datacenter) either. Otherwise the name of the database may not correspond in any way to where the database is actually active.

Finally, consider carefully whether you want to include the name of the organization or company. This has nothing to do with DAGs per se, but rather with the overhead of updating database names after a merger, acquisition, or rebranding. Unless, of course, you work for Contoso, in which case you should be OK.

Last month I wrote about my experience with American Standard's warranty process. I praised them a little too soon.

Friday, I installed the new "Champion 4 Accelerator" flush unit. Rather than the old-style flush tower, the Accelerator is a short, wide cylinder with a domed lid an an L-shaped overflow tube. When you push the handle, the lid lifts, and the accumulated water dumps into the trapway. Installation was easy, and the kit American Standard sent me included all the hardware I needed, including new tank bolts. Unfortunately, the new valve's performance was actually worse than the flush tower.

It turns out that the design of the Accelerator leaves about 4" of water in the tank. In other words, it doesn't deliver enough water through the trapway to empty the bowl. Ooops. Its height isn't adjustable, either. I set the water level to about 1/4" below the overflow tube, and that didn't do it. Thus it was with great irritation that I put the old, broken flush tower back into the hall bathroom yesterday. To compound the problem, American Standard doesn't take phone calls on Saturday, so I'll have to call them and find out what the suggested fix is.

Now I see why there's a class-action lawsuit against them over these toilets.

Following up on my post from the other day where I linked to Scott's step-by-step install instructions: my homeboys at Gold Systems have posted a step-by-step install guide covering installing the Exchange UM role in Exchange 2010. The big difference from a regular install is that you need the Windows Server 2008 Desktop Experience feature, because it includes the necessary audio codecs.

I finally found the comment problem: an obsolete version of the Javascript site template. Somehow I missed it during one of the (multiple) MT upgrades. Comments appear to be working properly now, which will no doubt thrill the two or three people who regularly visit here (hi, Mom!)

I got some great feedback via e-mail from my previous post about the value of Microsoft's MCM training. Shortly after I posted, Devin wrote a long and detailed post on the actual economics of getting an MCM: what it costs vs what you can potentially earn. In conjunction with his argument, I wanted to point out that the OCS MCM class is now on sale for its next two rotations: R2 (April 27-May 16) has a 50% "public beta" discount, and R3 (June 8-27) has a 30% discount. If only I had time to go!

Scott Schnoll and his posse delivered a great session on availability technology in Exchange 2010 at INTERACT yesterday. We've been using this technology for a while now at 3Sharp, and it really is very, very cool.

So, the really big availability news in Exchange 2010 is the introduction of a new construct, the database availability group (DAG). The DAG is a collection of up to 16 servers, each of which can contain a replica of a mailbox database. For example, I could put MDB1, MDB2, and MDB3 on server1, MDB2 and MDB4 on server2, MDB1 and MDB3 on server 3, and so on.

Mailbox databases are now the target object for failover-- instead of having an entire mailbox server failover using Windows clustering, the mailbox database itself fails over to another server within the same DAG. For example, MDB1 can move from server1 to server3, either automatically or manually.

Essentially, this is a mechanism for replicating mailbox databases between servers, something that the Exchange admin community has been asking for for years! Some highlights:

• Log shipping no longer uses SMB; instead it uses the ESE streaming API for seeding [ed: hat tip Scott Schnoll for the correction], which is considerably more efficient, and raw TCP sockets for replication. In Exchange 2007, there was one SMB session for all databases on a server. In Exchange 2010, there's one TCP socket per database, so scalability and parallelization are greatly improved.
• This provides HA for systems that are built on top of DAS; in fact, it's optimized for DAS. You can use dedicated storage per node; replication means that you can use JBODs without even using RAID.
• DAGs can span AD sites, subnets, and so on (although all servers in the DAG must be in the same AD domain). You can control and throttle DAG replication at the network level or using the DAG controls for log lag.
• The setup experience is completely different than SCC. To enable a DAG, you create a DAG and then add database replicas to it. You don't have to manually create any of the failover mechanisms, install any Windows prerequisites, or any of the stuff you'd have to do with single-copy clusters (SCC).
  

The advent of the DAG means that some legacy features are disappearing. First, there are no storage groups in Exchange 2010-- each database has its own associated set of logs. Second, SCC is dead (e.g. no longer supported). Personally, I won't miss it.

Interesting question posed by Josh Maher: do you still need backups? We debated this hotly at the MVP Summit. Microsoft's position is that some organizations may choose to do fewer backups once they deploy DAGs because their databases are already distributed across multiple servers in multiple sites. Of course, this distribution doesn't protect you against logical errors in the database, which to me weakens the argument that you don't need backups. Microsoft itself doesn't do backups internally any longer. They don't have business requirements to recover long-term archived mail.

Public folders: no changes, except that you can no longer use continuous replication for public folders. You can put a PF database on a server that's in a DAG, but you can't put the PF database itself into the DAG. Because Exchange 2007 limited you to having a single PF database per CCR-protected storage group, this isn't actually a loss.

More to come on this topic-- heaven knows there will be a lot of interesting stuff to explore as people start experimenting with DAGs in their lab. As for us, we're about to expand our Redmond DAG by adding a server in Toledo to give us site resiliency too-- should be fun!

UPDATE 15 Apr 1405 PDT: Ewan Dalton has more on the new features here.

It's been killing me not to talk about this, but now I can! On April 15, Microsoft will officially release a public beta of Exchange 2010 (formerly code-named "Exchange 14"). There are so many improvements in the product that I can't decide which ones to talk about first. I'll be updating this post to link to my own blog posts, as well as to interesting posts from other Exchange folks, so you'll see it update frequently.

Update [2233 PST 14 Apr]: the Exchange 2010 beta bits are now available for download!

Update [0549 PST 15 Apr]: the docs are up as well, and Scott Schnoll has posted a step-by-step install guide.

Last year, INTERACT was a fantastic physical conference held in San Diego (a hard location to beat!) This year, Microsoft's changed things up. There are separate, and mostly concurrent, events in Reading, UK, Boston, and Redmond, plus an online virtual event. I flew in yesterday and am now in the middle of an Exchange high availability session. There are two parallel tracks: one covering Exchange 14, and one covering OCS 2007 R2 topics. I'm mostly attending the Exchange sessions, but there are some pretty nifty OCS sessions as well.

The weather's been weird since I got here; yesterday as I was driving to the Microsoft campus, I drove into a good-sized hailstorm. The hailstones were small, but there were enough of them to perceptibly whiten the ground. Fortunately it stopped hailing before I had to get out of the car!

I'm preparing a series of blog posts on various topics that I'll post over the next few days. Some of these posts have some really exciting stuff in them that hasn't been publicly disclosed yet, so stay tuned!

Man, it's been killing me not to talk about OWA 2010. Take a look at this screenshot:

First: this shot's taken from Safari 4.0 beta 2 on the Mac. That's right: OWA fully supports Safari on Mac OS X (not Windows) and Firefox on the Mac and Windows, along with IE 7+ on Windows. (I can't remember if Linux Firefox is supported or not; I think so but I might be wrong). Safari and Firefox get the full premium OWA experience, with drag-and-drop, spell checking, notifications, and the rest.

Second: check out the presence jellybean in the upper-right corner. OWA is now integrated with OCS. In this case, the screenshot shows my mailbox hosted on Exchange Labs, which features Windows Live Messenger integration. Notice that my Messenger contact list appears in the lower-left side of the navigation bar, and that next to Arlene's name in the message pane, you can see her presence jellybean. (Take a good look at the context menu on the jellybean, too-- looks a lot like the one in Outlook, doesn't it?)

Microsoft's video showed conversation view very briefly, but this is one of my all-time favorite Exchange features. Here's what it looks like in OWA 2010:

So, for the conversation titled "Introduction", I can see all the messages in the thread, with the first non-deleted message automatically highlighted. The conversation view automatically includes deleted messages, sent items, and messages that I've filed in other folders, so I can get a sense of the conversation's length and spread. The view in the message list (on the left) shows how the thread branches (not much, in this case) and the location of each message; the conversation view itself on the right shows the active message, along with controls to expand other messages. Of course, I can select, move, and delete messages either individually or as an entire conversation.

Now, some of you may be scoffing right now, saying "wait a minute-- gmail has had conversation views for a long time." That's true. OWA's view is richer; it displays more visual information and is easier to navigate than gmail's current implementation. Take a look at these two screenshots to see what I'm talking about. The first shows a conversation originally imported from gmail as it appears in OWA 2010; the second shows it in gmail.

Speaking of gmail, OWA 2010 can aggregate and display in your inbox mail from multiple services, too. Check out what one of the Exchange Labs options pages looks like:

There are quite a few things to look at here. First, notice the account information pane, which allows users to set their own address, phone numbers, and so on. As an Exchange admin, I can control whether users may do so or not, but letting them do so has some obvious cost and time savings benefits for the IT staff. Second, apropos of self-service, check out the "Shortcuts" area on the right side of the screen: users can quickly get access to do a number of things directly from within OWA, like setting up Direct Push or creating server-side rules. Finally, notice the "Other Accounts" section; I've set up a link with my gmail account so that mail sent to my gmail address shows up in my Exchange Labs inbox. (OWA 2010 also lets you select the address from which mail is sent, much as Entourage does on the Mac, so I can send messages that appear to be from my domain or from gmail).

I could go on with features. For example, the message list isn't paged any longer-- it scrolls from beginning to end, just like Entourage or Outlook, seamlessly loading messages when necessary. There are tons of other little grace notes like this, but you'll have to wait for RTM to see some of them!

The media's been flooded with news about various kinds of job training, including Microsoft's Elevate America program and various state programs targeted at autoworkers, manufacturing workers, and so on. This makes sense, given that the economic mess we're currently in means that there's a lot of turmoil and uncertainty about jobs at all levels. Getting better training almost always makes sense, especially if that training helps increase your market value.

Greg Taylor, who runs the Microsoft Certified Master for Exchange program, just e-mailed me to say that he only has 2 open slots in the next MCM | Exchange course, starting May 4. We've had a lively debate about whether the MCM certification is actually valuable, in the sense that it's worth what it costs. After seeing the back-and-forth between people like Tony Redmond (who owns H-P's Microsoft consulting business), Gary Cooper, and Devin, the answer is clear: yes.

How is that possible? Simple. First, you get training that's literally not available anywhere else. A couple of weeks ago, I was there when Tim McMichael was teaching CCR and SCR. In the back of the room were Scott Schnoll and Ross Smith IV. It would be difficult to conceive of a better group to teach the real-world intricacies of how CCR and SCR can be deployed.

More importantly, when H-P (or IBM, or Dell, or other large shops) go in to a customer, the customer already knows them. They're not facing the problem of trying to convince a customer that a smaller, lesser-known shop can do a great job-- and can justify its bill rates. On the other hand, for smaller consultancies, MCM | Exchange is a terrific way to immediately lock the competence flag to 1. As Microsoft continues to evangelize the program, this effect will grow. That's why I'd jump into this rotation if I could... but I can't. However, you, dear reader, can. It's true that the training is about $13,000 (plus your living expenses). However, I believe strongly that for independents and smaller shops, you can sbsolutely recoup this value, and more. Check out the page, and if you're interested in signing up, ping me directly and I'll put you in touch with Greg.

The LDS Church's annual General Conference is this weekend. So is our trip to Louisiana. What to do?

Normally we watch the conference broadcasts in the comfort of our living room. This is easy because Dish Network, DirecTV, and U-Verse all carry BYU TV, and we've found that in extremis connecting my laptop to the TV and watching their live Internet stream works fine too. None of these, however, will work well in the van as we drive south.

Enter ooTunes, an iPhone application that can stream live radio stations over the Internet. It supports Windows Media streams, which not coincidentally are the kind that BYU Radio uses. I tested it this morning and it works quite well, even over a cellular connection. So, problem solved: we'll plug the iPhone in to the van's input jacks, launch ooTunes, and listen to conference as we roll. (As a backup, I've already told the U-Verse box to record it, just in case-- there's too much good stuff in conference talks to miss them!)